As Atlanta mourns, Washington waits

The massacre of 12 people comes on the eve of the House's consideration of this year's gun control legislation. Don't expect any tough new laws.

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In Washington, where the nation’s recent gun massacres have led to several proposed new laws, lawmakers Friday didn’t seem to think that the latest slaughter — by Atlanta day trader Mark Barton, 44, who killed 12 people including his wife and two children before killing himself — would have any legislative ramifications.

The April murders at Columbine High School were easily attributed to, among other things, a National Rifle Association-supported loophole in the law exempting firearms purchasers at gun shows from background checks. Guns used in that shooting, which left 15 dead, were purchased at a Colorado gun show, where little more than cash on hand is necessary to buy a gun.

Legislative remedies to prevent tragedies like the Atlanta shooting were not as quick to spot. “There still may not be any way from preventing something like this from happening,” Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., said in an interview with Salon News. “But this should prompt us to do something on the federal level.” Law enforcement, he said, “should at least know the people with guns, know their history, know their problems, know if they have mental problems, know if they’ve been suspects in other crimes — like this man, who was suspected of killing his last wife and her mother.”

Still, gun control advocates like Lewis felt the need to do something after Thursday’s killings. At the very least, Lewis said, “It must remind us once again that we must do something. We can pray for the victims, we can mourn the dead, but in the end we must act.”

Coincidentally, Friday morning the House voted on its conferees for the House-Senate Conference Committee meeting on the Juvenile Justice Bill — the main vehicle for gun control proposals in this year’s Congress. According to a House leadership aide, the conferees were instructed to figure out a way to prevent criminals from purchasing firearms at gun shows — though not to comprehensively close the gun-show loophole.

As indicative of how tough it is for pro-gun control legislators to accomplish anything in the existing Congress, it was apparently necessary to instruct the conferees to refrain from weakening any existing gun laws.

When asked if there were anything Congress could do to prevent such tragedies from occurring, John Czwartacki, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, said that “this is the problem with a democratic society. There are laws on the books, and you gotta enforce them, but when you have a suicidal psychotic, there’s not much government can do.” Czwartacki further observed that progress had finally been made on the Juvenile Justice Bill as the Senate — which had been held up by the actions of Sen. Bob Smith, I-N.H., was able to appoint its conferees for the Juvenile Justice bill on Wednesday.

John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said, “Its obviously tragic. You have these nutcases doing this stuff and it makes you wonder about your own security. I mean, anyone who kills his own kids is a sicko.” When asked if there were anything Congress could do to prevent further incidents, Feehery said, “You could outlaw sickos, but I’m not sure if you can do that. Unless you have everyone carry a gun.”

Feehery experienced a similar incident one year ago this month, on July 24, 1998, when he worked for Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and a paranoid schizophrenic named Russell Weston Jr. burst into the office with a revolver. “When a sicko came into our office, we had someone to protect us,” Feehery said, referring to Officer John Gibson, one of two Capitol Hill police officers to lose his life in Weston’s attack. “Unfortunately, the people in these offices in Atlanta had no one to protect them. It makes you scratch your head. You want to be protected from these kinds of characters, but I don’t know what the answer is.”

Police announced Friday that the 9 mm Glock pistol Barton used was purchased legally in 1993. Police added that the .45-caliber Colt handgun he also used for his slaughter was an older model, and somewhat harder to trace.

But regardless, there apparently was no reason for Barton to be denied the right to buy any gun. Even though Barton was a suspect in the Labor Day 1993 murders of his first wife, Deborah Spivey Barton, 36, and her mother, Eloise Powell Spivey, 59, the police were never able to amass enough evidence to indict him. Thus, with no criminal record, Barton should have had no problem legally buying a weapon; guns are as easy to get in Georgia as beer.

“He could have gone to a gun shop, he could have gone to a gun show, he could have gone to a flea market and bought a gun without even giving his name,” said Lewis.

Further, Georgia has especially lax gun laws, permitting almost all non-felons to carry concealed weapons if they so choose, with little law enforcement say in the matter. It is not yet known if Barton had a concealed weapon license, but there is little reason to believe that he would have been denied such a license.

Even if a wary neighbor had been tipped off to Barton’s mental instability, there is nothing in Georgia law that would give law enforcement the means to take his legally purchased gun from him. Federal law prohibits those who have been legally judged to be mentally ill, as well as anyone involuntarily committed to a mental institution, from buying or owning a firearm.

Barton did not fit into that category, although, during the custody hearings for Barton’s (now-dead) children in 1993, a district attorney who reviewed Barton’s psychological tests said that the results “to this day make me shudder.”

Handgun Control Inc.’s Sarah Brady pointed out, however, that a Connecticut law that will go into effect Oct. 1 will give law enforcement the right — under stringent conditions — to remove guns from the homes of those who are deemed a significant threat to the community.

Such a law would seem to have little chance of passing either the House or the Senate in the current political climate, where members of Congress, according to Lewis, “are hostage to the NRA.”

Comparing Barton to other shooters known in their neighborhoods as more than a bit unstable — like Matthew Beck in Connecticut, Carl Drega in New Hampshire, Di-Kieu Duy in Utah, Gian Luigi Ferri in California and Russell Weston in Washington, D.C. — Brady said that like them, “Barton was a walking time bomb, and at least some people, prior to the shootings, recognized that fact.”

Barton’s rampage seems to have been preceded by at least one homicidal rage that didn’t involve guns. His first wife and mother-in-law were hacked to death in an Alabama trailer park by a knife that police were never able to locate. And before Thursday’s shootings, Barton appears to have bludgeoned to death both of his kids from that first marriage, 7-year-old Elizabeth Mychelle, or “Shelly,” and 12-year-old Matthew, as well as his second wife, Leigh Ann, 27, in his Stockbridge, Ga., apartment.

That’s three, or possibly five, notches on Barton’s belt before a gun necessarily even fell into his hand. Though, of course, the luxury of distance and rapid fire that guns provide for homicidal maniacs can’t be beat by knives or blunt instruments. Hence, Barton was easily able to kill nine people and wound 12 others in two Atlanta offices without anyone touching a hair on his head.

It is probably worth noting that even if Barton were the poster boy for NRA-backed gun loopholes, even if he had been a convicted felon who purchased an Uzi at a gun show — that wouldn’t necessarily signal a call to action in the halls of Congress. It was a year ago this week that two Capitol Hill police officers were shot right outside the office of DeLay, who has received $28,000 in NRA money since 1986. That tragedy hasn’t affected DeLay’s stance on gun control one iota.

“Is it going to take something like this to happen in all 435 congressional districts in America, in all 50 states, before we do something?” an exasperated Lewis asked.

Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot

Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot

Slide 13

Airplane Contrails: Globalized transportation networks, especially commercial aviation, are a major contributor of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Photo of contrails in the west London sky over the River Thames, London, England.

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R.J. Sangosti/Denver Post

Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot

Fire: More frequent and more intense wildfires (such as this one in Colorado, USA) are another consequence of a warming planet.